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2007’s Core Commitments team is all smiles.
GROWING UP TO GETHER
Diane Casey, an administrative assistant in the Math and Science Department, loves how “nurturing, open and welcoming the college has always been,” not only to its students, but also to the extended families of its employees. At a college event, Casey, Patricia Demaras and Maureen Spinney shared stories about watching fellow colleague’s children grow up, via the sporadic afterschool visits the offspring would pay to the two campuses to say hi to their mothers and fathers. “Many of us have raised our families together while working alongside one another,” Casey said. Many employees have proudly watched their children join the student body at Middlesex, as well. Professor JoAnn Lamoureux joined MCC’s Dental Hygiene faculty in 1973. Thirty-eight years later, she’s still here, and now her daughter, Danielle, is a student in the Dental Assisting program. With Lamoureux’s impressive history at the college and the number of classes she has taught, it isn’t a surprise to hear that she has crossed paths with so many of her students again. In fact, six of the other hygienists she works with today are MCC graduates. Lois Alves, Vice President of Enrollment Management, Research & Planning, said that the struggles so many of the college’s longtime employees endured together are what have helped fortify the feeling of a family on campus. “Back in our earliest days, we had classrooms as long as railroad cars, some had pillars down the center. Others had holes in the walls, or there were no computers,” she recalled. “Our documents would print out on a printer in a completely different building than where our offices were. We had to share staplers. We had what we called ‘midnight requisitions.’ You’d walk around at night, see a table you’d like, and grab it for your office before someone noticed it missing in the morning. But there was a spirit of everybody working together under tough conditions to get things done for our students. That’s what helped create the fabric of camaraderie on our campus,” said Alves.
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